Critical Harry Potter Scholarship - Or why J.K. Rowling could not have written Harry Potter

It's certain now, JK Rowling could not have written Harry Potter. In fact, this is no longer a hypothesis, it's a fact. Using Historical Critical Methods™, it is easy to demonstrate this beyond a shadow of a doubt. 4 main proofs can be introduced for this: anachronisms in the text, contradictions, linguistics, and questions of narrative flow. What I hope to achieve here is to show that not only did J. K. Rowling not write Harry Potter and that there must have been more than one author, but also that I know with total absolute certainty who did it. To deny this would be to go against the Scholarly Consensus of Very Serious Unbiased and Super Smart People™. (thicc right?)

In all seriousness: As I have not read Harry Potter in years and don't intend on doing so ever again, I must give great thanks to Harry Potter Wikia for having all of this information for people to use. I hope they do not mind it being used to mock some Biblical 'scholars.' (This is not to dismiss all supporters of historical critical methods, the documentary hypothesis, or anything like that. There are certainly good arguments for these views, and plenty of people like Richard Elliot Friedman among others are worthy of consideration for their opinions. The main problem here is the absolute certainty that they claim, along with a lack of charity when coming to the text) 

Anachronisms:

"The beginning of the story takes place on a "dull, grey Tuesday." But in 1981, 31 October was on a Saturday."

It seems unlikely that an author who had been alive in the 1980s could get this wrong. One would clearly know or at least check when it was written. It is therefore obvious that the author must have been later, not knowing this sort of thing. We must therefore assume that the author was born post 1981.

"The trip to the zoo is said to take place on a Saturday, but Dudley's eleventh birthday (23 June, 1991) was actually on a Sunday."

We see here too, another anachronism, this time, it's in 1991. Because such an error for a contemporary is absolutely impossible, we must say that the text must have been written by somebody not born before 1991.

The author seems to put much emphasis on England, while Rowling spent much of her time in Edinburg, Scotland. How could it be then, that she wrote it? The simplest answer is that the author was not Rowling, but somebody living in a different land, born much later than the 1960s. As such, despite the fact that there are attributions for the text even in the autographs, we must conclude that they are wrong. The author is hereby anonymous.

Contradictions: 

"On Harry's Hogwarts list of school supplies, "1 Wand" is listed twice, as both the first and last item on the list. This mistake was fixed in later editions of the book. The list of school supplies also doesn't include potion ingredients, although Harry later buys them. In later editions of the book this has been corrected."

Here we see a clear contradiction. If only one person had written Harry Potter, why would there be contradictions? (no, it's not possible that an explanation exists as to why the author intended this, or that people have sloppy writing. This is a clear mistake, any attempt at harmonization is a failure to use Critical Methods™ and it is essentially rank FUNDAMENTALISM)

"Harry buys the book One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi, but later, he looks up dittany in "One Hundred Magical Herbs and Fungi". This error was, however, amended in later editions."

Again, no single author could make a mistake, so obviously it's more than one writer.

"During the Hallowe'en feast, when the troll is let in, Professor Dumbledore sends the students to their dormitories. But the troll is said to be in the dungeons, and that is also where the Slytherin dormitories are, meaning that Dumbledore has put them directly in harm's way by sending them there. The logical move would be for every student to stay in the Great Hall, do a roll call, and send teachers to go and look for missing students."

At this point, anybody who thinks that J.K. Rowling even had a vague hand in writing Harry Potter is drinking fundamentalist Kool Aid, no serious scholar would question the anonymity of Harry Potter.

Linguistics:

Here, it's difficult. Do I want to utterly disregard linguistic studies and posit an absurdly late date that would be impossible, or do I want to point to the language and show when the text was written (not just edited to be up to date)? In both cases I can annoy those FUNDAMENTALISTS. Hell, why not do both? (For the text to Harry Potter, here is the standard scholarly edition)

"Mr. Dursley always sat with his back to the window in his office on the ninth floor. If he hadn't, he might have found it harder to concentrate on drills that morning. He didn't see the owls swoop ing past in broad daylight, though people down in the street did; they pointed and gazed open- mouthed as owl after owl sped overhead. Most of them had never seen an owl even at nighttime. Mr. Dursley, however, had a perfectly normal, owl-free morning. He yelled at five different people. He made several important telephone calls and shouted a bit more. He was in a very good mood until lunchtime, when he thought he'd stretch his legs and walk across the road to buy himself a bun from the bakery."

Looking through this, at first it would seem like this is ordinary English of the late 20th Century. Instead though, we see the word "hadn't," which according to all of our extant manuscripts of late 20th Century writing was never used. Before the 21st Century, contractions were rarely if ever use, especially for written English. (never mind the fact that we don't have all or even much of the writing of the time) Clearly this was written in the 21st Century then, not in the 20th as one could have supposed earlier.

For clear linguistic differences that demonstrate multiple authorship, I could just point this out and be done:

"Dumbledore told her it was true. Dumbledore, however, was choosing another lemon drop and did not answer."

Here, one must notice the phrasing "did not," while in another section of the text the author(s) says "didn't":

"They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense."

This is clear use of multiple sources.


Narrative Flow:

Now, we have two starting points to show that there were more than one author: first, we have clear contradictions, and second, we have changes in the use of language. Now, if there was more than one author, it clear that they created different sources and used a patchwork. (again, denying this would be rank FUNDAMENTALISM)

If we take this part of the text, something very interesting becomes clear:

"A man appeared on the corner the cat had been watching, appeared so suddenly and silently you'd have thought he'd just popped out of the ground. The cat's tail twitched and its eyes narrowed.
Nothing like this man had ever been seen on Privet Drive. He was tall, thin, and very old, judging by the silver of his hair and beard, which were both long enough to tuck into his belt. He was wearing long robes, a purple cloak that swept the ground, and high-heeled, buckled boots. His blue eyes were light, bright, and sparkling behind half-moon spectacles and his nose was very long and crooked, as though it had been broken at least twice. This man's name was Albus Dumbledore.
Albus Dumbledore didn't seem to realize that he had just arrived in a street where everything from his name to his boots was unwelcome. He was busy rummaging in his cloak, looking for something. But he did seem to realize he was being watched, because he looked up suddenly at the cat, which was still staring at him from the other end of the street. For some reason, the sight of the cat seemed to amuse him. He chuckled and muttered, "I should have known.""

The narrative flow seems normal enough, is this not true? Indeed, however, it is clear that more than one source was used. How do we know this? If we were to move sections around, we could still find that the text is coherent:

"A man appeared on the corner the cat had been watching, appeared so suddenly and silently you'd have thought he'd just popped out of the ground. The cat's tail twitched and its eyes narrowed.Albus Dumbledore didn't seem to realize that he had just arrived in a street where everything from his name to his boots was unwelcome. He was busy rummaging in his cloak, looking for something. But he did seem to realize he was being watched, because he looked up suddenly at the cat, which was still staring at him from the other end of the street. For some reason, the sight of the cat seemed to amuse him. He chuckled and muttered, "I should have known." 

Here, the astute reader will see that even if we remove parts of the text, it remains coherent. If this is the case, it's very clear that there was more than one author. 

(This is not meant to be serious, but a joke about critical biblical scholarship, hopefully that is obvious. Further, it's not meant to suggest that there are no good biblical scholars, or that it's not an interesting field, but there is a bit of hubris in the field, and often they make unwarranted leaps of logic)

National 'Catholic' 'Reporter' - Why Even Bother?

Few names are as misleading as that of the NCR, or 'National' 'Catholic' Reporter. They aren't nationally famous, so they shouldn't be called National, and they reject Church teaching on nearly everything, so they should much less be called Catholic. This article here is a great example. It's obviously old news, 10 years old in fact, and it shouldn't be shocking, but as a convert, this type of full blown apostasy really still is. The thing that keeps coming to my mind is, "why even bother?"

It was written in relation to Pope (sadly emiritus) Benedict XVI's book on the life of Christ. Here is a small taste of their article:

"A leading New Testament scholar, and former Catholic priest, has criticized Pope Benedict XVI’s 2007 book on the Gospels, Jesus of Nazareth, saying that its insistence on identifying the historical Jesus with the Christ of traditional Christian faith has “turned back the clock” on modern scholarship.
The comments from Geza Vermes, author of the acclaimed book Jesus the Jew and a longtime professor at Oxford, came during a summit of leading Western intellectuals May 16-17 in Lugano, Switzerland, devoted to the theme of “truth.” The gathering was sponsored by the Balzan Foundation, which awards the Swiss-Italian equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
Vermes spoke as part of a panel on religious approaches to truth that also included Swiss Cardinal Georges Cottier, former theologian of the Papal Household under Pope John Paul II.
Vermes devoted his presentation to arguing that on the basis of the New Testament, the image of Jesus that emerges is that of a charismatic, wonder-working Jewish holy man, and thus not the divine Son of God claimed by later Christian tradition."

If this were not a newspaper claiming to be Catholic, this wouldn't be a problem. They're reporting the words of a former Catholic priest who is also a notable scholar. What's nitneresting though is that they don't try to present the opposing view. Instead they interview Vermes, the scholar who they talk about. What's amazing here is that they don't even mention somebody like N.T. Wright, Michael Licona, Craig Blomberg, Richard Bauckham, or any other scholar of the New Testament who would say that the Christ of faith was a real flesh and blood person, not a theological construct.

The trouble here, as with the rest of modernist Catholic approaches to biblical studies, is that if one takes only the writings of secular scholars without the light of faith, one will be pushed into a sea of doubts. A layperson finding this article who does not have enough time to read other scholars will be shocked and might have their worldview rocked quite a bit without good reason.

It's very confusing to me why somebody would not believe in the Christ of the gospels yet use the Catholic label at all. More importantly, if the claims that Christ made for Himself were false, there would simply be no hope for anything. There would be no future redemption, no justice, nothing, just a world of blind indifference. Those who try to create a historical Jesus outside of what we see in the Gospels, essentially wish to rob the world of its only chance for any meaning or future.

With Geza Vermes it's especially funny, seeing as he converted from the Catholic Church to Judaism, and lo and behold, the historical Jesus was not the Christ us Christians believe in, but a Jewish Holy Man. Likewise, in the 19th Century, when German thinkers sought to find their 'historical Jesus,' He turned out to be a German Hegelian of some kind. When people tried another quest in the 20th Century, especially in the 1970s and 80s, Christ was made to look like a social revolutionary. Is this a coincidence? It doesn't seem so.

But if the NcR is willing to buy into the 'historical Jesus,' why do they bother calling themselves Catholic? Why not be National Agnostic Atheist Reporter? Why not National Humanist Reporter? I guess they think that liking the guitar music at Mass counts as being Catholic. Maybe this is a misreading of the article, but it does strike me as strange that they didn't even give the counterarguments that exist.

"The Absurdity of Life Without God"

This video is one of the better ones I've seen of William Lane Craig. (it is very blurry sadly) It is interesting to compare with the beginning of St. Augustine's Confessions:

"“Great art thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is thy power, and infinite is thy wisdom.” And man desires to praise thee, for he is a part of thy creation; he bears his mortality about with him and carries the evidence of his sin and the proof that thou dost resist the proud. Still he desires to praise thee, this man who is only a small part of thy creation. Thou hast prompted him, that he should delight to praise thee, for thou hast made us for thyself and restless is our heart until it comes to rest in thee." (Book 1 Chapter 1) 

Dr. Craig is speaking of the utter meaningless of life without God, while St. Augustine is going further: our essence and end goal is His worship. The two combined do not point to God's existence, but they do raise an interesting question; is it not utterly absurd that we are designed to want something as our main good that we cannot in principle have? While Aristotle called man a rational animal, we could also think of humans as religious animals. Virtually all cultures ever have had religions, no matter how primitive or developed. It would be hard to deny that a sensus divinatis exists in man.

This is why St. Paul says that God is written on men's hearts, and that if we reject it, it we have no excuses:

"Because that which is known of God is manifest in them. For God hath manifested it unto them. For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; his eternal power also, and divinity: so that they are inexcusable. Because that, when they knew God, they have not glorified him as God, or given thanks; but became vain in their thoughts, and their foolish heart was darkened. For professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. And they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of a corruptible man, and of birds, and of fourfooted beasts, and of creeping things. Wherefore God gave them up to the desires of their heart, unto uncleanness, to dishonour their own bodies among themselves. Who changed the truth of God into a lie; and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. (Romans 1:19-25, DRB)

At some point I will try to give some of Aquinas' conclusions on predestination as would be found in the Summa Theologiae and Reginald Garrigou Lagrange's Predestination.